The story was that Patty’s father had nodded off drunk one afternoon at Cushing Beach. Somebody else found Patty, who was only two or three at the time, facedown and floating in the surf. They pulled her out and got her to Mass. General, but she was never right after that. Growing up, she had that look, the chubby face, eyes a little off-kilter, her mouth thin-lipped and cornered down. The father insisted she was fine and was content to let the neighborhood raise her. No special schools. After puberty, she developed an infatuation with men of the cloth. Stalked them over at St. Brigid’s like a girl after a boy band. Many nights, the cops had to come pick her up for tapping on the rectory windows. It was scandalous. She should have been sent away.
Over time, her obsession switched to cops. The uniforms, Rita figured. And Jimmy Milk, he took what was offered him. For that, he was made to marry her, a shotgun wedding with the neighborhood and not the father holding the gun. But Jimmy Milk never regretted it. She waited on that man hand and foot, worshiped him as if he walked on water and cured the sick. Her boys, too, Eddie and Jimmy, Jr. Three men spoiled by a damaged woman, raised in a rent-controlled O Street walk-up on the salary of a transit cop too timid to grift.
Patty would often ask Rita about Rita’s son Billy. Going on about how proud she must be, her eldest son a builder, living up in Swampscott. And Rita always told her, not rubbing it in but trying to give the poor woman some hope: All you need is one good one.
“Ain’t that the truth,” answered Patty this day.
That was strange. Patty had a little extra spring in her step, Rita noticed. She wasn’t trailing behind like the runt of the litter. And didn’t Rita hear that Eddie Milk lost his T job some months back?
“You have news?” said Rita, these being the most words the two women had exchanged in the last five years.
Patty gazed out at the sea, the gulls coasting with their dirty wings spread wide in the salt air, and Rita realized that Patty Milk was positively bursting.
Derrick sliced up the whiskey bread his mother had baked. Irish soda bread with raisins soaked overnight in Hennessy’s. When the mood struck, she would bake up a few loaves for neighbors and friends, whoever was on her good list that month, and always one to take by Marian Manor, where she worked. The bread was soft enough and safe enough for the elderly patients to gum, and the raisins put them right to sleep.
Derrick paused a moment, realizing that the knife in his hand, the one with the splintered handle, was the same knife he had used to slice up Sulky Nealon. But that was a month or so ago, and besides, the blade had been washed and dried.
His mother baked bread today because Billy was home. Derrick’s brother, the golden boy who married a fat girl from the North Shore and moved out of Southie. Today he had returned for a rare Sunday dinner.
“Slice that thicker, Derr,” said Rita, Derrick’s mother. And for some reason, he did. He had a lot of patience today. Because there was something good on his horizon. Something big.
“You get down to the Island today, Ma?” he asked from the kitchen.
“I got my walk in, yeah,” she said, from the parlor. To Kelly, Billy’s pregnant wife, seated next to her on the divan all polite and shit, she said, “Good for my lungs.”
“Still rollin’ with the gray ladies?” said Billy, an inch taller in new, heeled shoes.
“I’m to be the fifth grandma in the bunch,” said Ma. “Today out there, it was just two of us. Me and Patty Milk.”
“Milky’s ma, huh?” said Billy, some of that North Shore condescension crawling into his voice. “Good old Milky. What’s that mope up to these days?”
“That’s the thing,” said Ma. “Derrick, you hear anything about Eddie joining the force?”
Derrick almost laughed out loud. “Eddie what?”
She went on, to Billy, “I was telling Patty about you putting up the new development in Wilmington. She said her Eddie had some good news coming. That he was working for the police on something, a special project. I figured MBTA, but she seemed to say no. Derr, didn’t you tell me he got clipped from the T?”
Derrick had stopped slicing. He was staring down at the sliced bread, the whiskey-soaked raisins swollen, yellowed. He set the knife down on the carving board.
Derrick stood with Milky outside Hub Video. Milky was scratching lottery tickets with his thumbnail and dropping the losers to the sidewalk, one after another.
“Still playing, huh?” said Derrick.
“You kidding me?”
“I quit that.” Derrick shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “I’m quitting a lotta things. Thinking about it.”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“Don’t know exactly. Change in the air around here, I guess.”
Milky dropped his last scratch ticket. He looked concerned. “Well, maybe that’s a good thing.”
“I think it is. Like, you getting pinched again a couple of days ago. Not good. How’d that thing go?”
“The usual. Except they forgot about me in there and I was in longer than I should’ve. I pay this fine, I avoid the thirty days. Which I have to do. My ma.”
“Yeah,” said Derrick.
“I was going to see, maybe, if you could front me some. Against this thing at the end of the month.”
Derrick said, “You want some up-front?”
“Fine’s twelve-fifty.”
Derrick’s eyebrows climbed. “That’s steep.”
“I need the dough to stay out here. Think you can do?”
Derrick put one sneaker tread flat against the brick wall behind him and crossed his freckled arms. “Pushy. This ain’t like you, Milky.”
“I’m walking a tightrope here, you know?”
“How’s your ma doing, anyways?”
“Her? She’s good. She’s all right. She’s got her TV. Her chair.”
“Been walking with mine out on the Island.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know that. Good. Keep her from turning to stone.”
Derrick watched Milky step foot to foot on the sidewalk in the cooling night air. Milky was straight now, but the dancing-in-place told Derrick he didn’t intend to be for much longer.
“So, can you front me? Or any chance of moving this thing up?”
Derrick said, “Now you want me to move it up.”
“If I go away for thirty, how can I help you with this thing?”
Derrick looked out at Broadway, the parked cars lining both sides of the broad avenue. A white van turned past them onto Emerson, and Derrick stared it down. Then he figured that wasn’t very smart. He had to play this cool.
“I’m pushing that thing back,” he said. “Maybe indefinitely, I don’t know. I’m starting to think there’s a better way out here, you know? Things are changing. Don’t look it, but they are.”
“A better way?” said Milky.
“Twelve-fifty, huh?”
“In five days’ time.”
Derrick nodded. “But your ma there, she’s good?”
“She’s good, Derr, yeah. She’s good.”
“Good,” said Derrick. “That’s good.”
Yarrow stopped with the darts pulled out of the board. He turned. “What?” he said.
Derrick said, “I’m telling you.”
“This is based on what?”
“And I been going dizzy here trying to think back, all the things I told him. Trying to think, has he ever been inside this house without me around? You know — listening devices and such.”
Yarrow returned to him from the wall, Derrick pulling another Killian’s Red from the old Coleman cooler. Yarrow toed the chalk line on the basement floor and readied a dart. “You’re getting paranoid.”
“Think back on him. Think hard.”
Yarrow threw a nineteen. “You been smoking too much.”
“It explains things. Little things going wrong recently. Something’s in the air, abuzz. He’s all into me for this coming-up thing.”